Page 5 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

I have not slept.

At two in the morning my phone lit up with a single grey text from a contact I had saved as WARHIP DO NOT TEXT AFTER TEN.

One conversation.

I shot straight up in bed and squeaked. An actual squeak, out loud, alone in the dark. Then I typed and deleted eleven different replies before landing on a simple Thank you. Tomorrow. My place. Coffee's on me.

He never answered that. But he had already given me the only word that mattered, which was yes, wearing a costume of two words that were not yes.

"Jilly." Patsy snaps her fingers, and both other phones vanish into her blazer as if she palmed them. "Sit. We talk about the offer before your green friend rolls up, and I want you locked in."

I sit on my upturned bucket. She perches on a sawhorse across from me, ankles crossed, laser-focused.

"Three sponsors called this morning," she says. "The mattress people. The paint people. And..." She pauses for effect, because Patsy is incapable of delivering information without a drumroll. "Hearthwell."

The name lands in my gut like a swallowed stone. Hearthwell is not a sponsor. Hearthwell is the sponsor, a home-goods empire with a budget the size of a small nation, the sort of partnership that does not merely rescue a channel but sets a person up for the rest of her life.

"They want the barn," Patsy continues. "The whole build. Full series sponsorship, six figures, with an option to renew." She leans in. "And they want him. Prominently. That is the condition. No orc, no deal. They were extremely clear. The exact phrase used was 'the man with the shoulders.'"

I clamp my hands between my knees so she cannot catch them shaking. "And if I get him?"

"If you get him," Patsy says, "you never worry about money again. This building gets finished. Your brand gets rebuilt. You headline their spring campaign. You go from a girl whose sponsors were fleeing to the girl every sponsor is chasing." She spreads her hands. "This is the whole game, Jilly. The entire game in one hand of cards. All you have to do is convince a man who hung up on you yesterday to point a camera at the one thing he clearly hates having pointed at him."

I stare into my coffee. The surface trembles with the beat of my own pulse.

Yesterday I poured the last dregs of my savings into a lumber order. Yesterday four sponsors sat one bad month from dropping me. Yesterday I cried on camera about a pipe.

Today the biggest home-goods company in the country wants to make me a star.

If I can deliver a man who wants nothing to do with me.

Here is the part I will never say out loud to Patsy, because Patsy runs on metrics and I run on something softer and more embarrassing. For four years I have built an entire life out of pretending. Pretending the house is finished when it is a shell. Pretending I am rested when I am running on concealer and cold brew. Pretending the smile is real when the smile is the product. And the one man I have to recruit to save all that pretending is a man who looked at me for ninety minutes and never once bought a single frame of the performance.

"He's coming here to talk," I say slowly. "That's it. He said one conversation. He hasn't agreed to any of this. He has no idea about Homestead. He has no idea there's a whole..." I gesture helplessly at the ruined ceiling. "Patsy, he genuinely does not want to be perceived. By anyone. Ever. Yesterday he collected his check without meeting my eyes. This is a man who chose plumbing so he could work under sinks where no one looks at him."

Patsy's smile holds steady. "So we make it worth his while."

"With what? He doesn't want fame. He doesn't want followers. Money bounced right off him yesterday like I was offering him a coupon."

"Everybody wants something," Patsy says, standing, brushing sawdust off a blazer that costs more than my truck. "Your job in the next ninety seconds is to find out what. And my job is to stand in the driveway pretending to make calls so a seven-foot man doesn't bolt the second he spots a second human." She checks her lipstick in a phone camera. "You have exactly one shot at this, so please, for the love of my commission, do not do the thing where you fill silence with talking."

"I don't do that thing."

"You are doing it right now."

"One shot," Patsy repeats, holding up a single manicured finger. "And Jilly? When he says no, and he will say no first, because men like that always say no first, do not accept it. A no is just a yes that has not found its price yet." She says it like gospel, like a woman who has closed a thousand deals on exactly that principle. Maybe she is right. Maybe that is the whole difference between us, because I have spent my entire career terrified of hearing the word no, and Patsy collects them like poker chips and stacks them by color.

Gravel crunches outside.

Both of us go still. Through the enormous sliding door I have finally mastered leaving open, a truck rolls up the drive, old and clean and enormous, and it stops, and the door swings wide, and the whole rectangle of morning light fills with him.

He blots out the sun.

My prepared speech, all eleven rehearsed minutes of it, files itself neatly into the back of my skull and evaporates entirely. He reveals himself in sequence, the way a building does when you walk toward it. Boots first, scuffed and enormous. Canvas work pants gone pale at the knees. A torso that strains the seams of a plain grey shirt. Shoulders. Tusks. Eyes the deep gold of old brass fixtures, sweeping the room like it is a schematic he is checking against code. He aims none of that attention at me. He aims it at my house, and I would swear on my ring light that he likes my house better than he likes me, and for reasons I decline to examine, that lands somewhere tender.

I stand up so fast the bucket flips again. He crosses the threshold ducking his head under a beam that would clear any human by a foot, and he straightens inside, and the barndominium that swallowed my entire life savings suddenly reads as small.

He wears a shirt today. I resent, immediately and irrationally, the shirt.